About this time a few years ago, my niece and I were walking in Charlottesville up to the Corner, where I had promised her a treat. I was holding her hand as we walked through the Grounds of UVa. It was a beautiful winter evening. There were Christmas lights on the trees, but I hadn't noticed them. I was worried about the street crossing and the people and the time and whether or not I was going to be able to finish my paper that was due the next day.
And suddenly, she stopped dead in her tracks and forced me to stop too. "Look, Auntie Barbara!" she said with awe and wonder. "There's stars in the trees!"
I looked up and saw the trees on the Corner, lined up and lit up for Christmas. I wondered for a moment if I ought to correct her, to explain that there were actually filaments and bulbs made up of plastic and electricity in the trees. Instead I paused and looked at the trees and saw that she was right. For a moment, I saw the world the way a four-year-old sees it, and I saw that her way was a little bit more accurate than mine.
"Oh. You're right," I said quietly.
Christmas is a good time to remember the wisdom we learn from children, the wisdom of living in the present and receiving the gift of the present moment. And then it can be a time of being still and seeing things exactly as they are: not as we imagine them, not as we fear them.
Poet Marie Howe has an exercise every year that she teaches her poetry students. She says that she tells them to simply write down three things that they see every day. And it's funny, she says, how difficult it is when they first start, to avoid comparison and metaphor, and to simply see things as they are. But after a few weeks of this careful observing, she says:
"Then this amazing thing happens. Clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff, and it thrilling. The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, the maple tree, the blue jay."
Everyone feels the change, the shift within themselves that has taken place when they finally begin living "the sacrament of the present moment."
That is the space where life happens, where gratitude happens, where poetry happens.
I think that's one of the reasons why the Church insists on Advent, and doesn't do the retail world's "Hallow-Thanks-Christmas." The quiet space of Advent draws us out of our busy-ness and into the sacrament of the present moment, into the realization that the world isn't only made up of plastic and electricity: the physical world is always pointing us to something deeper than itself -- though we are physical creatures and must begin by paying attention to our physical world.
Advent is the place of paying attention, the place where we stop -- "look!" as my niece said -- and only when we stop and look can we begin to approach the Nativity scene and see something more than a poor family with their baby in a manger.
